LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT MOVIE FULL

In that primordial soup of fringe culture, before it congealed in the late ’70s into a billion-dollar industry called “contemporary Christian music”, it was just a bunch of folk singers wielding guitars, who up and got saved, turned the “you” in every song into “Jesus” and wallowed in all things peacenik while sometimes lapping out into the outer bounds of the eschatological, strumming away earthly discord with the chords of hope in the second coming of Jesus to wipe away every evil. But the whole grousingly unholy intercourse of religion and politics as we know and loathe it today must be plotted from the point when it was just an innocent flirtation between those long-haired Jesus freaks and the thin tentacle of entertainment called “Jesus music”. I’m certain that ones entrance into his inner circle must have required a frisking for smuggled-in They Live specs.

If we want to trace the political life of that strain in modern times by popping a start tack in the timeline, it can just as easily be the late ’60s/early ’70s Jesus movement as it can be anything else, like, say, the reptilian hatching of Jerry Falwell, with his sausage fingers pulling him up from the dank pools of television ministry up to the mountaintop of broad, if at first oblique, political power.

I need not be the one to point out, there was and is a strain of religion in our country that rivals the worst of any enemy with whom we’ve courted Armageddon, and it plagues us to this day in ways insidious, fracturing, hilarious, and sad, depending on which way you’re letting the light of reason and decorum hit it.

LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT MOVIE FULL

Full disclosure: I was and am a church-goer, born and bred in the drawling (if not drooling) buckle of the Bible belt, at once a product of my evangelical upbringing and an expert post-indoctrination chronicler of it. Thing is, I’ve been fascinated by this relic of apocalyptic fear-mongering since the day I first laid eyes on it at the age of 12 at a church camp in Louisiana, and I’ve needed to write about it ever since. I’ve been afraid I’d stir some brand of offence, vis-à-vis his sensibilities, with almost anything I’ve looked to put up, so why not, I thought, just go ahead and stray far afield and help ensure a minor blasphemy by putting up a piece of overwrought and possibly irredeemable docu-fiction masquerading as mid-century Christian propaganda? My great hope is that despite its failings on several easily discernable levels, my choice is taken in the spirit of sharing niche-y artifacts, whether its passion and value aren’t quite so quickly discernable. See how I just threw the general population under the bus? Point is, I don’t have much of a gauge for what he may or may not like or dislike among the several options I laid out for myself as a contribution to the festival christened in his honor. I’m woefully uneducated in world cinema, past or present – though I’m trying – but I think I may still be well above average for the general population. But I can guess what he might’ve thought of me. Fish, so I never had the pleasure or benefit of the conversation or guidance or iron-sharpening-iron experience that so many here have spoken of. To my regret I never spoke, online or live, to Mr. And on the 8th day, God created rudimentary film language.

Like a thief in the night movie